Better advice: if you want to do a startups, get some experience, find some good partners, test out ideas in your own time, and when you have enough runway and something that looks solid, only THEN make the leap.
This. I have a PhD and a failed startup. It felt real bad, and I didn't get that far with it (9 months before calling it quits). Creating a successful startup requires significantly more energy and stress than most science jobs, even for pre-tenure professors.
It requires different skills than science. Few introverts will succeed at founding a company, for example. Moreover, you have to produce actionable results quickly, and you have very different success metrics.
I'm one degree of separation from a PhD startup founder that literally killed himself as his startup imploded, when the company was 5(?) years old. Severe depression, loss of all semblance of a life... these are standard in the world of startup founders. The risk that you destroy your life is real.
Of course if you are so introverted that you are unable to make eye contact or talk to people it will be a problem, but most of us are not that extreme.
Especially so for PhD recipients. Unless they're from money, they've probably already spent their post-grad years living very modestly. Starting a startup just extends and amplifies that, which can be dangerous.
This is comically obvious when you look at some successful startups... My brother joined one (not technically as a founder, but he left the same company as them to join as a day 1 employee). They occasionally post PR pictures of themselves. They all look ridiculously like successful, smiling, talented and dynamic people, the kind of people a VC probably likes to see. Except my brother, who looks totally like the bookish introvert that he is.
Well well, I figure smart VCs knew that they have good reasons to have that one guy around.
That fear is one of a few reasons why I don't think I'll start a startup any time soon.
Or the social and economic safety net.
Also, if your product is similar to another you may get caught in costly legal battles but this is unlikely to occur as a scientist. It will most likely "just" tarnish your reputation.
While the monetary rewards of creating a successful company exceeds a good academic career it is, as the author points out, high risk.
I wouldn't call a high risk gamble that has possibly detrimental long-lasting effects over your life and your co-founders life "sensible". I'd call it a gamble, as that is what it is.
Comparing the two situations I'd argue the business option is far better for a number of reasons. The most important being freedom. To survive in academics now is an awful game of proposals and nonstop stress. Success rates are very low and there is intense competition. And all for very little (no) payoff. And it is a sales job. At the end, before I finally pulled the plug I often likened academics to a situation where you're selling something that people may like, but they don't want to pay for it. If you do it right with a company, people are begging to pay you. And the reality is the business route is much more challenging, just in a different way. Everything is on the line.
I do think promoting a "startup" in the conventional sense where you have VC funding and explosive growth is disingenuous. There are many opportunities where a PhD scientist can carve out a niche where you have a company with 1-10 million in revenue. It affords an excellent situation that, if sustainable, is orders of magnitude better than the academic lifestyle that is so often idolized.
Proposals and Stress = Check
low success rates and intense competition = Check
Need for sales = Check
I can't help but think you essentially have the same situation in academia as one has in a startup, only "it's different." The difference to me is the illusion of control. One may think that they are in control of the startup vs. the bureaucracy of government/academia/established business.
I posit that most things that are required by business are, in fact, not under your control. The illusion of control is there and one may feel that actions are leading to certain outcomes, but the truth is they have no direct control of the outcome. "Luck" plays the same role in the bureaucratic or private enterprise affair... some have it and others don't.
Just look at the Yo app. They got $1 million in investment (for some reason). Their technology was nothing special, in fact it was literally written in a day. But their CEO apparently had an in with some investors, or they were _very_ good at sales/pitching.
I'm not discounting the difficulties present in each scenario (or the luck). However, after ruminating about all the pluses and minuses, I believe one is likely better off trying the business route.
As a business owner that meets other business owners every day I believe "luck" is not that important.
There is a lot of space for normal business in the world, that solves a problem, give a service or creates simple products. You can be good at it or not. Most successful owners I know are not lucky at all.
Luck applies to the "changing the wold" thing, but 99% of business are not that way. People at HN has a distorted view on that reality.
Not as low or intense as academia IME :(
When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life.
My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.
Maybe don't belittle things you've never done?
Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conducting original research, writing papers on one's research, preparing and giving talks at conferences and seminars, along with writing the thesis and (at least in the first year or two) taking classes.
My thesis was in fact just over 100 pages. It also required a lot intense studying (on top of my basic undergrad and graduate education) before I understood the topic well enough to begin to do research on the topic, and quite a lot more work before I started to find worthwhile original results to write about. Here "a lot of work" doesn't mean a few late nights, it means years of working as much time as possible every week.
As someone who was in the working world for almost 10 years before returning to school, I assure you my thesis represents a lot more hard work than anything I ever did in "the real world."
All that said, this article is nuts. Very few PhDs are in a good position to launch a startup. But not because PhDs "know nothing about life or work," and not because they are unfamiliar with hard work.
Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."
1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator.
2) The article is off - very much because there is a multitude of outcomes when it comes to personal development during a PhD.
It is an obscenely grueling path that let me know it wasn't one I wanted to head down.
It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others.
I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers.
I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.
Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor.
Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.
By contrast, the odds of your startup not failing are like 10%. Now if we're talking about actual 'success' then that's like 1% or less (it certainly feels like that from where I'm standing).
With these sorts of odds, you don't have this feeling of 'meritocracy' that you might get if you came right out of uni.
>Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.
You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.
Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.
Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.
Finishing assignments is to what a PhD student actually does is as `printf("hello world\n");` is to what a developer does.
What is hard is the work that you have to go to to get to the 100 page thesis. Try working a 100 hour workweek, including sleeping the lab only to find out that the experiments that you've set up completely go to hell because of a minor detail that you missed at the beginning. Five or six times. (with 75 hour workweeks in between) Over the course of a year. Not taking any vacations. Five years over.
I'm a phd student and my idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since I started, too. The master's was child's play. Now it's about determination and finding avenues forward when facing problems that are so large that even finding a good question to ask is a major success. Staying up late and putting in the hours is the easy part.
This is not as simple as you imagine it to be.
This. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. While I subconsciously knew the work I was doing in school wasn't real, I still attributed value to it. Looking back, while it had value, it was fundamentally different value than real work. Its value was most temporal, i.e., if I got it done on time, it was valuable. This has little to no direction correlation to real life.
Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. And in general, a missed deadline is bad, but doesn't reflect on the intrinsic value of the work (there are exceptions, of course).
Hard work is worthless when applied to intrinsically worthless work, regardless of when or how it is completed.
If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.
That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.
I used to think staying up 24+ hours working on something was what hard work meant. Today, for me, hard work means getting adequate sleep, making sure that I have great energy so I can function for 10 hours a day on my personal projects, school, work, and wellness.
A Ph.D means you have higher than average IQ and you have grit, honestly, without will-power no body completes Ph.D. which have great correlation of success.
You can learn marketing (which is very important), improve you EQ with seminars but Depth of Ph.D. and grit to the finish line is not easy to get.
Its not automatic, but I agree with the essence of the article.
edit: I am not a Ph.D.
Sure, many PhDs are eminently capable of starting a startup and some will be wildly successful. But that's more likely to be because they have a burning desire to commercialise their research or a great founding team sees their skillset as the missing link than because they couldn't find an alternative
Yes - the IQ, work ethic is there. But they are differential.
All the succesfull business people I know have been 'hustlers' since grade 1.
Look at the early emails between Zuck and others at Harvard. Age 19 that kid was already a baby shark. Very cynical, competitive (granted, it might be an ivy league thing).
Successful entrepreneurs I find are more like Trump than not.
And I don't think that Google and a few others are good examples. Aside from the 'top 10' big companies, you'll find that most are classical alpha dudes, really hustling hard, trying to make $$$ any way they can, focusing on those outcomes.
PhD's tend to be very deferential to authority, they believe in 'true outcomes' (i.e. some kind of real progress) etc. when often Entrepreneurs don't care that much: have produce, hype it up, make money.
Steve Jobs was a hustler, not a scientist. Taking credit for others work, massively leveraging over his own staff (taking their equity etc.). Gates, Ellison, Benioff, same deal. Travis K of Uber I think is much the same, and in many ways I think Zuck as well. Bezos. Even a lot of the 'shy' type CEO's, I think, are still inner hustlers.
Obviously these are huge generalizations.
As for correlation with success, I wonder if you could elaborate? What measures "success"? What studies are you referring to? What confounding issues (if any) are accounted for?
Do you have any particular reason for stating this? Having been in both environments, I actually think that academic grit translates outside of academia more fluidly than the other way around.
Conjectured reason: most academic projects have a horizon of 5-20 years to market and require large amounts of very mundane and uninspiring work. There are infinite distractions within academia. A successful academic project isn't going to make anyone rich, and even if it does, that person probably won't be you. Also, the pay is terrible.
Startup and even corporate life are very different in almost all of those dimensions. Projects succeed or fail fast. There are few distractions, especially for individual contributors. There's still routine work, but usually routine in the sure-to-succeed way rather than the sure-to-fail-and-be-repeated-10x-times way. A successful project can easily make you a valuable person -- either on the job market or in terms of actual net worth. And even if everything hits the fan, you're receiving a reasonable salary and building your career.
> It's also debatable whether a PhD absolutely implies an above average IQ
That is certainly true.
However, I do agree that "grit"/"will-power" is definitely required.
Finally, consider that, upon entering a doctoral program, many students don't intend on academia at all. That number drops by the time they complete their dissertations, too.
Ultimately, I'd give a rough figure of 1 in 4 qualified and motivated PhDs getting a suitable tenure-track position in a reasonable timeframe (~4-5 years). Maybe one in five or six will get tenure, in the end. Which is still terrible when you think about it, but the odds aren't nearly as ridiculous as some would claim.
My feeling was I can work a lot of hours for little pay and questionable benefits as a post doc or start my own thing. I use 'start my own thing' since I hadn't ever heard of doing a start-up being in the Midwest.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?
* Years of grunt work. You just did that on your Ph.D. Don't kid yourself, start-ups are just as hard and can take longer before they are successful. As they say in show biz, it takes years to become an overnight success.
* Business smarts are non-optional. If you are in a leadership position you need good business acumen. (I.e. like Andy Grove, not like Bill Shockley.)
* You need to be an all-rounder who can roll with the punches and pitch in to do whatever needs to be done. Chances are only some of that will be science and some fraction will be downright unpleasant. My personal favorite: the head honcho in a small company is the top of the product support escalation chain. By the time users get on the phone with you they are often downright steamed.
Finally, if you don't fit the mold there's a reasonable chance you'll either just flame out nothing to show for it or get fired. That's in addition to all the normal stuff that goes wrong when you have a good idea, good funding, good co-founders, etc. Doing a startup is not for everyone.
"According to the Start-up Genome Report 92% of high-tech start-ups fail. ... If you can get as far as investment this number falls to around 40%, and your chance of making it big within that sits at around 10% (Pitchbook). This adds up to a 0.48% success rate overall. Interestingly, this is the same proportion of PhD students that reach professorship."
Hmmm.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest ulterior motives are in play here.
Um, yes except for the part about paying for food and shelter ??
Interestingly, this can be justified by economic theory, because it's the marginal price of the next transaction that everyone sees, so you always need someone who's willing to buy in for a higher price.
Once everyone has already bought in and there's no fresh money to prop up the bubble, everyone can immediately see that, and things fall apart just like you said.
When we ignore the social component of our lives, big surprise, it atrophies and dies. I have a PhD because many people (a society) invested in me to get one. My PhD is not something I should use for my own enrichment by building a "career" and a "startup" to satisfy my job requirements, there should be a substantial portion of my effort that is socially directed, that gives back the enormous amount that was given to me to get me here.
This is why I will remain stuck in academia forever, desperately seeking that shrinking universe where someone can attempt to produce pure public goods.
This seems wrong to me.
This may be true for consumer facing products or tech investors like YC, but it misses that biotech investors have been investing $1B+/quarter into science based startups for over a decade now [1]. I suspect that as far as absolute numbers go traditional biotech investing still dominates in this space.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucebooth/2015/07/23/the-ventur...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Essential-Guide-Turning-Ph-...
I recently enquired about a possible career at a small (<50 people) consulting firm. They do mathematical modelling and consulting and have scored a few high profile contracts. The work is interesting, easier than the typical Ph.D stuff and yet still challenging and varies a lot.
BUT! They pretty much only hire Ph.Ds. Why? It's mostly a reputation thing. When they send you to help out a client they don't want to send somebody who "only" obtained a masters.
The firm was started by two Ph.Ds out of school and could essentially be considered a startup. Barely 10 years old I believe.
But the overall point is interesting. I feel there's a slight bias against academics from "the startup scene" or maybe I'm just imagining it being a mediocre scientist thinking about starting by own business every now and then (so not the super duper elite MIT guy). I've always felt that some of the stuff you learn by practicing science is fairly valuable even in a web based startup. Depending on the field you're more or less forced to get a better understanding of statistics and rigorous testing (with all the pitfalls involved) and the general hypothesis/test-it cycle is really helpful for startup life as well. For me the sad trade of is that my programming skills (mostly the secondary skills like architecture, being up to date on databases, refining the vcs workflow, testing etc.) erode slowly. I also have a lot less time for side projects these days which kind of sucks. [I haven't taken the traditional academia career path and actually worked at a software company before so I feel like I have a decent grasp on both fields]
If you feel compelled to start up a company, I say do it.
Put yourself 100% in. You might be 100% successful, or, you might be 100% a failure. But do not think the statistics make you one or the other.
Only advice I would give is to get yourself on decent financial footing before making the leap. It helps you from making impulsive/bad decisions later.
Your startup journeys could succeed but the odds are against you. Though, whatever its a ton of fun and the stories that come from it make you a more interesting candidate when going up for your first Developer job.
I had two startups fail yet I was able to raise incubator money for both, invited and had a demo meeting with Google, invited and filmed for a reality tv show about makers(I think I maybe a good marketer hence these opportunities yet I suck at people skills) and a lot of other random out of nowhere stuff.
Overall, great times with many lows that are now great life stories even if I'm not a millionaire I now earn a good living coding.
This is true in the sense that the amount of VC poured into things such as social networks or SoLoMo startups is decreasing and the amount of VC poured into things such as machine-learning based startups is increasing. Even though the amount poured into the first is still larger than the amount poured into the second.
However, this article shouldn't discourage people with just an undergrad (or even without an undergrad) to start startups. A group of 22 year olds might know about Deep Learning and might just apply it as a medium to a solution in a different narrow domain than a group of 40 year olds will.
Yes - they have the smarts. Yes - they know how to learn (but are sometimes arrogant enough that they won't). Yes - they know how to work hard. But there's something about the academic culture that makes for ... I don't know. Something. I haven't nailed it down, and I wouldn't go so far as to claim "advanced degrees considered harmful", but startups are hard in a different way than academia prepares one for.
That said: you learn a lot in the first one. And get to learn more about the wrong lessons from the first on the second. Why not give it a whirl?
I think "startups require almost the exact same skills as science" is true only in the broadest sense....like, doing work of scientific value is hard and requires intelligence and discipline, and this is also true of startups.
It is also true that there are many people who are exceptionally good scientists who are not good entrepreneurs (and wouldn't be if they tried), and vice versa.
Say you average $x per year for 3 years, then your startup fails, so you join bigcorp at $y. So at the end of 4 years you have 3x+y.
Your conservative classmate joins a bigcorp and stays there 4 years averaging $z per year. So he now has 4z.
It's a simple exercise to enumerate tuples (x,y,z) where 3x + y > 4z.
Literally in every case I have seen up close and personal, the LHS exceeded the RHS. And I'm not going to argue with math.
A failed startup can be very expensive. You might break even. You might not. Just from the financial perspective on it, when you start including negative and near-zero values on the left side of that equation, conservative job at bigcorp starts looking good.
Then think about the rest of your life. Surely there is some value in getting enough sleep, having free time, work-life balance (because your work isn't 100% of your life), and a basic level of security. Startup life sucks; there are far fewer people who have what it takes (including luck) than there are people who think they do.
On top of that, nobody tells you, but when you go to get a real job after starting a company? If you didn't have big-name VC, "Oh, that was your company?" the interviewer asks... but what the interviewer clearly means is actually "Oh, so you were unemployed"
I mean, I'm not saying that you shouldn't start a company, I'm just saying that you need to be mindful of the risks. Yes, you feel free when you are young, but any money you put into retirement then is extremely impactful. The same is true of anything you put into covering your long-term housing short.
Even if I could talk to myself in my early 20s, I probably could not talk him out of starting a company, but... i would be way better off now if he could have been talked into being more conservative... into maxing out all available tax-deferred retirement options, into limiting the amount of money and the amount of my self that I was willing to sink into the thing. Into buying a fucking condo, at least. Something.
